Next generation data centers are characterized by the mandate to meet all of the IT needs of the enterprises. This includes the support for infrastructure-less and paper-less enterprises and providing of both data and application services: applications could be offered as hosted services. For various business reasons, an enterprise could distribute its data and applications across multiple data centers; similarly, a data center could host data and application services for multiple enterprises. One of the major concerns of enterprises in such a scenario is about protecting their data/software assets. Enterprises would want a secured environment that assures both performance and protection. Summarizing, distributed data centers are managed by multiple third parties and enterprise data is distributed across multiple data centers.
Data center operations rely on the usage of XML for transactions, information exchange, as well as for management of data center components. Next generation data centers are being organized around a services model. The distributed data centers not only host enterprise data but also host applications. Further, software as a service offered by the next generation data centers enables an economical access to the third party software. Data centers are becoming an irreplaceable part of enterprises. The intellectual assets of an enterprise in the form of applications, workflows, and data are all need to be protected and the enterprise needs to have an awareness of the activities that lead to the usage of applications, and inspection and modification of data assets. All these lead to a need to be able to watch, log, audit, and verify the multifaceted transactions. In order to achieve this, first of all, there needs to be a single entry and single exit to a data center from / to the enterprise. The same entry/exit needs to be used as well during interacting with other data centers in a distributed scenario. Secondly, anything and everything that happens within a data center (again from the enterprise point of view) needs to stored and analyzed. This is the concept that leads to the idea of “black box”: a box that is owned by an enterprise and installed within the physical premises of a data center thereby establishing a systematic monitoring of the activities of the data center (again from the enterprise point of view).